Stray Studies from England and ItalyGreene, John Richard
History
Stray Studies from England and Italy
Greene, John Richard
Italy -- Description and travel
So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the
organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts
that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter
triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then
flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally,
to "unkennel that fox," his foe.
Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries
and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious
pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to
the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective
"the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the
chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even
in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse
profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the
regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the
chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker
was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the
royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a
dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were
disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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